As the field strategic management has grown in the past six decades the tools to teach the concepts are limited for both students and managers. A review of academic literature finds that primarily this subject is taught using case studies of real businesses and there are very few experiential exercise or games available (Joshi et al., 2005). In recent years business schools have introduced new instructional methods and experiential exercises, and games to enhance the class room experience (Nulkar, 2016) because it has been argued that games improve student engagement because it may simulate the reality (Goltz and Hietapelto, 2011). Academics who have experimented with Gamification of the strategic management field find that it is useful to teach the basic tenets of the subject (Wallis and Wright, 2015). A detailed review of general gamification for teaching purpose found that it has positive impact on teaching and learning (Hamari et al., 2014). In fact it has been argued that in business context the market is ripe for Gamification (Dicheva et al., 2015) but there are not many business-themed games currently available to the students and the teachers or the trainers. In fact in an article at the Harvard Business Review, the author Andrew Innes argues that “Monopoly may be the world's favorite business-themed game, . . . but it's not necessarily the best one to hone your management skills or teach you what you need to win in business today” (HBR January-February 2015 page 118-119).
References used in above sections are listed here: a) Joshi et al., 2005, Experiential learning process: Exploring teaching and learning of strategic management framework through the winter survival exercise, Journal of Management Education, Volume 29 Issue 5, pages 672-695; b) Nulkar, G., 2016, Strategic Tangle: A Cocreated Strategy Game for Management Students, Management Teaching Review, Volume 1, Issue 2, pages 120-127; c) Goltz, S., and Hietapelto, A., 2011, Teaching across management disciplines with board games. Proceedings of the Organization Behavior Teaching Conference, pages 7-11; d) Wallis, S. E., and Wright, B., 2015, Strategic knowledge mapping: The co-creation of useful knowledge. Developments in business simulation and experiential learning, Volume 42 pages 1-18; e) Hamari, J., et al., 2014, Does gamification work? A literature review of empirical studies on gamification. Presented at the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), IEEE, pages 3025-3034; and f) Dicheva, D. et al., 2015, Gamification in Education: A Systematic Mapping Study, Educational Technology & Society, Volume 18, Issue 3, pages 75-88.
The search of Patents database finds that there have been some attempts to create tabletop games (board games or card games) that are training tools for a variety of subjects related to business. These include teaching value for money, U.S. Pat. No. 7,364,163 B1 (Savage); U.S. Pat. No. 4,354,684 A (McKinley) focusing on simulated business progress and business-related goals; U.S. Pat. No. 7,273,213 B2 (Gibbons et al.) that attempts to gauge the concepts of customer loyalty; U.S. Pat. No. 5,056,792 A (Helweg et al.) has a specific focus on financial topics such as assets, liabilities and future commitments of finance; U.S. Pat. No. 4,386,778 A (Hall) with a complete focus on teaching the rules and processes of construction industry and U.S. Pat. No. 6,237,915 B1 (Ledet et al.) that teaches project management skills.
The major weaknesses of these approaches pertain to the fact that the above-mentioned games, in the previous section, are focused on a very narrow scope of the subject matter. Additionally, none of these games directly focus on teaching a variety of topics from the strategy management field. Many of these games are played at individual level and therefore do not provide the opportunity for team building (a critical component of any corporate training). Many of these games are not generalizable to full spectrum of functions across a business enterprise and as such are ruled out to be a tool for annual strategic retreat of a firm. Given that strategic planning and strategy formation are most common topics in strategic retreats, there is a strong need among trainers to use hands on activities and experiential exercises or gamification of these topics to improving learning among participants. Unfortunately, the presently available games fall short on delivering these ideas easily.
Present invention has a valuable contribution because BiggieBills is interactive board game that allows for a dynamic real-time experience for the participants. Unlike other simulation strategy games available in the market place, the dynamic feedback loop and counter offensive in real time are its strength. The core learning comes from the debrief process by the instructor (moderator of the game) after the game is won by a team. This game covers many aspects of the current research in the field of strategic management such as resource based view of the firm, game theory, first mover advantage, competitive dynamics, competitive advantage, business level strategies such a low cost leadership and differentiation strategies, industry assessment, corporate level strategies such as strategic alliances, globalization and diversification. Finally, the customizability of industry conditions creates the possibilities for targeted learning topics and customizability is also applicable to the mode of playing the game. The game can be played “Face to Face” or “Online.”